TELUS Health acquires BC-based EMR provider Med Access Inc.

Vancouver, B.C. – TELUS Health has acquired 100% of the shares of Med Access Inc., a leading Kelowna-based company providing electronic medical record (EMR) services to 2,000 specialty and general practice physicians in B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario. The acquisition brings the total TELUS Health EMR reach to more than 12,500 Canadian physicians, supporting more than 45 million patient interactions each year. Financial terms are not being disclosed.

“EMRs are the cornerstone of emerging technologies, helping healthcare providers enhance patient care through better collaboration, cost management and workflow benefits. These technologies hold significant promise to reduce wait times and ultimately produce better health outcomes for Canadians,” said Paul Lepage, president, TELUS Health. “We believe that connecting healthcare providers and patients is a natural extension of our core business of connecting millions of Canadians with the people and information that matters most to them.”

TELUS Health plans to integrate Med Access’s industry-leading eReferral platform across all its EMR offerings, while continuing to support the Med Access EMR platform as one of the best EMR option available to Canadian physicians.

“The eReferral platform offers healthcare teams the opportunity to develop a new continuity of care strategy by allowing them to electronically forward any information in a patient’s chart directly to another care provider, thereby reducing potential data entry errors and helping to enhance patient care,” said Brendan Byrne, vice-president, TELUS physician solutions.

“We have every confidence that TELUS Health will be a great partner as we continue to develop our leading EMR platform to manage the complex demands of modern medicine and patient care,” said Paul Walker, president, Med Access. “They understand and support our vision to keep our customers’ interestsfront and centre at all times.”

Over the past six years, TELUS Health has invested more than $1 billion in healthcare technology development, including the acquisitions of EMR providers Wolf Medical Systems in Western Canada, PS Suite in Ontario and KinLogix in Quebec.

Telus is now strong in provincially certified primary care oriented EMRs, but not as strong in specialty systems. While consolidation may be a goal, I have seen no indication that this is their strategy. Because all of the EMR systems have been developed based upon proprietary technologies, none of the data structures are standardized. As a result, migration and amalgamation is problematic. This is further complicated by poor data quality as a result of the way in which information has been captured in EMRs by users. Even for a company with the resources of Telus, purchasing more EMR companies is challenging - each has their own development team and support requirements, not to mention the differing interface and technical requirements in each province.